Big Benefits for Small Businesses: In Conversation with Alex Tolbert, BerniePortal

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In an increasingly competitive hiring environment, how can small and medium-sized businesses win top talent with attractive benefits packages? BerniePortal Founder and CEO, Alex Tolbert, shares his insights on how SMBs can overcome strategic challenges to building competitive benefits packages for their employees and thereby driving business growth. Tolbert is a nationally recognized expert in the health, benefits, and HR technology space and has also authored a book titled “Online Benefits Technology: The Strategic Broker's Guide”, that was published in 2017.

Let’s start by briefly introducing BerniePortal. In a sentence, what is BerniePortal and what’s its unique value proposition?

BerniePortal is an all-in-one HR and benefits software system that allows small and mid-sized employers to solve their transactional HR challenges with software and their strategic benefits challenges with the help of a trusted advisor.

Why does BerniePortal place such an emphasis on streamlining HR processes, including benefits administration? How does this focus help organizations grow and succeed?

The HR ecosystem is incredibly fragmented for most employers. From onboarding to benefits election to time tracking, these processes are traditionally disjointed and managed on paper. Add in compliance liability, and you have a huge headache for HR and business leaders. As a result, many of these teams spend their time “chasing the paper,” rather than where they really want to spend their time — pursuing new business, working with clients or growing their team. Great software streamlines these systems and reduces errors, but it doesn’t solve the strategic challenges small businesses face when it comes to building competitive benefits packages for their employees. This is where our broker partners are able to provide immense value alongside our tech solution.

What is the one trend in the HR software industry that you’ve noticed in the past three to six months?

Not to work with brokers on your small business HR platform is akin to having a small business accounting platform and trying to cut out CPAs.

Zenefits has been the most noteworthy company to finally realize this, but others have begun to as well.

Interoperability and integration are definitely pain points that many companies face when dealing with multiple software solutions. With an industry like HR, where it’s vital to make sure that a lot of sensitive information is seamlessly moved from recruiting, onboarding, benefits, to payroll, it relieves a lot of headaches and questions. What are some other challenges you have noticed?

Small and medium-sized employers, on average, are not offering benefit packages that are as robust as large employers. In a competitive hiring environment, this puts smaller employers at a disadvantage. Many might think the reason is due to cost—that small businesses can’t afford to offer as many lines of coverage as a larger employer—but this actually isn’t the case. Many ancillary options can be offered at no cost to the employer. What keeps employers from offering these benefits is transactional and administrative challenges, not hard dollar costs. Online benefits systems and HR platforms eliminate these administrative challenges, which means by going online, you can expand your benefits plan without increasing the costs.

What is your take on the massive explosion of HR tech companies across so many categories? Salesforce as well is making inroads into the HR space. Do you see competition, opportunities to partner and/or integrate?

Your point about “so many categories” is a good one. No one ever says that there are so many “categories” of salesforce automation software. What a sales leader needs from a software package is really pretty basic versus what HR needs, which is because the number of distinct process flows that HR has to manage is so much more complex.

That said, we believe it is important to be open and work with other companies, as integrations are extremely important for HR. That is why BerniePortal has an open API used by companies such a Paycor, the payroll company, to pull benefit deductions. We also have an EDI engine that allows insurance companies to pull the eligibility information that they need.

What questions are your buyers asking you? How is that impacting your platform’s roadmap? Are there any new features or upcoming upgrades that you’re excited about and would like to give us a sneak peek into?

We just launched our applicant tracking feature, BerniePortal Jobs. This will allow potential new hires to go straight from the application process to onboarding and benefits enrollment in one cohesive, comprehensive platform.

There’s been a lot of talk about improving user experience with HR software recently, how does BerniePortal address this?

One thing that sets us apart is that our partners are never guinea pigs for new upgrades and features. BerniePortal was created out of benefits brokerage Bernard Health, which allows us to internally test all new developments to create the best user experience before rolling out to our partners.